Eyebrows were raised this week when the run-in to the Giro d'Italia – for British followers of cycling at least – was dominated by the rival claims of Sir Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome for leadership of Team Sky at a race which is eight weeks distant: the Tour de France. It might have seemed premature at best, given how much can change between the Giro start in Naples on Saturday and the Tour start just across the Mediterranean in Corsica on 29 June.

It makes sense, however, to Stephen Roche, the Irishman who is one of the few cyclists to have achieved the Giro-Tour double and who was at the centre of one of cycling's most celebrated battles for supremacy within a team. The Giro holds the key to the Wiggins-Froome question, he believes. "It hinges on the Giro," says Roche.

"If Wiggins wins he can use that to his advantage, going into the Tour with no pressure, saying he will ride for Froome while hoping that maybe he has a bad day and he can take over. But if Brad doesn't win the Giro, he will want to win the Tour and it could become bitter. He will want to win the Tour at any cost."

The cycling rivalry which has served as a model for all the others since, that between Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali between 1940 and 1953, had its roots in the fact that the pair were team-mates at the start of Coppi's career, and was spiced up when they raced together for the Italian national team. The start point came when the youthful Coppi overthrew his leader, Bartali, in the 1940 Giro; its nadir came when the pair, wearing national colours, marked each other out of the race – to universal derision – at the world championship in 1948. Reuniting them for the azzurri to ride the 1949 Tour, which Coppi won, required a celebrated and much publicised "summit meeting" before the race.

Coppi and Bartali is the stuff of cycling legend and so too is the tale of Roche and Roberto Visentini and their public battle for leadership of the Carrera Jeans team during the 1987 Giro d'Italia. The story, briefly, was that the pair had an agreement that Roche would support Visentini in the Giro and the Italian would back up the Irishman in the Tour; Roche, however, got the impression that Visentini would not keep to his side of the bargain and rode the Giro to win for himself, sparking a massive dispute which ended with the team split in two, raging mad fans threatening Roche with violence and waving raw steak at him. Interviewed recently, Visentini was barely able to speak about the episode, so bitter were the memories it engendered.

The contest between Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond, again riding for the same team, in the 1986 Tour, did not plumb these depths but the intrigue was more intense, with constant speculation whether Hinault was indeed helping LeMond or trying to win for himself. The pair retained strong feelings about it several years afterwards. I interviewed both of them, in 1995 and 1994 respectively, and they still stuck to their positions: LeMond felt Hinault had gone back on his agreement to help him out; Hinault maintained that in attacking LeMond, he was putting pressure on the entire race and so helping his young team-mate win the Tour, which he eventually did.

Such rivalries are inevitable in cycling, because this is, as the old saying goes, an individual sport run on a team basis. "Brad is putting pressure on Froome, but Brad isn't just a one-day champion," says Roche, who, when he was alongside Visentini, was well aware of the Italian's frailties. "As a champion, you can be loyal, but at the back of your mind you hope a chance comes your way."

The Irishman's view is shared by the writer Richard Moore, author of Slaying the Badger, an account of the conflict between Hinault and LeMond in 1986. "It boils down to the fact that cycling is not a team sport – the riders are individuals. The compromises cyclists make to become team players are made because they can't win. It wasn't in Hinault's nature not to try and win." Those who heard Wiggins express his desire for a Giro-Tour double on Monday might say the Briton has similar qualities.

The Wiggins-Froome partnership – or rivalry, depending how you look at it – is nowhere near as rancourous as Hinault-LeMond or Roche-Visentini, but the two Britons are building up a shared history that, alongside the achievement of winning a Tour de France, includes its share of controversial moments.

No less than nine pages of Wiggins's account of 2012, My Time, are devoted to the stage to La Toussuire where Froome appeared to swerve away from the team's agreed plan by attacking the Londoner on the final climb. That illustrates the strength of feeling such episodes engender, as does the revelation that Wiggins felt such a degree of confusion and betrayal that he contemplated pulling out of the race. He is less forthcoming about the Pyrenean stage finish at Peyragudes, in which Froome repeatedly pulled ahead of him, and gesticulated to him to hurry up. The former British Tour champion Robert Millar, for one, felt this was needlessly theatrical.

Further back, Wiggins and Froome cohabited uneasily at the 2011 Vuelta a Espana, where Froome was climbing more strongly than Wiggins, but was made to support the Londoner until the final few days. The decision had a logical basis, as Wiggins was tried and tested over three weeks, whereas Froome had emerged from nowhere after being affected by the tropical disease schistosomiasis and, as Wiggins said: "Even Chris was surprising himself on a daily basis … so I guess I was the safe bet."

Moore sees "definite paralells" with the Hinault-LeMond battle in the jockeying for position between Froome and Wiggins. "Wiggins made a vague promise to help Froome, and LeMond argued that he had helped Hinault win the 1985 Tour. But in 2012 Sky were so strong that Froome was rarely called upon. It wasn't that he was shirking; he wasn't required. There is an element of Sky being Wiggins's team as La Vie Claire was Hinault's; like LeMond, Froome is an outsider."

Roche is keen to underline that much has changed since 1987: "Cycling in general has changed. These guys are intelligent and they will respect team orders, and the public will expect them to be sporting-minded." But one thing has not changed: the urge to win that drove all those involved in cycling's great intra-team battles. It is what sets the greats apart, and the glimpses we see of it in such episodes is what give them their lustre. That remains the same, and it could well power the Wiggins-Froome question until late June at least, and perhaps deep into July.